Casual Players - Gaming's "Silent Majority"

There is a term that we often throw around in the war gaming community. For all that we use it, it seems to have no solid definition. Some players use it to describe others, and some players use it to describe their own self. Yet, if you were to ask those players what the word meant, then you might be surprised at how many definitions you come up with. The word is “casual.”

I had always lived with the prospect of a casual player being familiar but not expert with the rules. He or she plays for the enjoyment of playing with winning being much lower on the list of goals than camaraderie or creating interesting stories. That's what I thought as I approached a friend when I was explaining how a competitive game system benefited the casual players.

For my friend, he saw himself as a casual player. He would get his models out a couple of time a year. He would do his best to build a hard army to beat. While the bit about familiarity with the rules was there, rules would be remembered in a manner that benefited my friend; or challenged when they did not. Play further degenerated when the books were turned to for seeing exactly what the rules were.

I realized at that point, we were speaking of different things. There are things about his playstyle that reminded me more of what some would find in a competitive player. Yet, by his own definition, he was casual.

Since Warmachine and Hordes were built with competition in mind, we try to be considerate of our expectation of a casual player. On podcasts when a new ruling about a rule comes into play like unit attachments granting their troop type to a unit they join or Rhyas gaining reach; there is some mention that casual players might not be aware of the changes or be able to understand the full implementation of the ruling without the play style that competition brings. Think, for a second, of how that shows how we think of casual players.

There is a part of the more competitive community that does not think that the casual community pays attention to rest of the world. Read the big boards, though, and you will see casual players looking for advice on better army builds. (I'll have to deal with that topic at some point, there are bad army builds. You know it, and I know it.) You'll see questions pop-up in the rules forum that could be answered by most competitive players, but casual players don't come across those types of situations very often. Care to venture a guess how many of the views for those posts are casual players trying to find an answer to a question that came up in one of their games? Something that made them feel bad about their play experience?

This is something to think about when we posit ways that Privateer Press and the Warmachine/Hordes community might fix models that have gathered dust on the shelves of gaming stores and competitive players by posting new rules or cards. However, we defend inaction to do such things with the thought that casual players won't be able to keep up with the changes. It may be time to change how we think about what casual play means. Perhaps we need better terms than “casual” player.